Once again we’re hearing a lot about how newspapers are probably going the way of the Dodo, and folks seem pretty confused and alarmed by the prospect. And once again I am underwhelmed. I am also under-alarmed by the demise of our auto industry, the advance of e-book readers, and just about any other new technology-slash-economic condition that threatens a well-established sector of the world.
Behind all of this hand-wringing is, of course, fear; but not fear of a world without newspapers, really. At its core it’s a fear of the unknown. We’ve all grown up with, say, newspapers in our lives. They’re familiar and comfortable, and even folks who haven’t bought a newspaper in their lives are used to having them around. Imagining a world without newspapers is difficult, because we’ve never existed in such a world. It’s easy, then, to imagine that such a world will be worse than the current one, simply because we, as a species, don’t like change. Especially change we have no control over.
Whatever will happen to journalism without newspapers to uphold standards? I suspect new standards will evolve and be upheld, and within a few decades there will be a couple of silver-maned Blogs or web sites that will have taken on some of the burnished air of the respected old source. Newspapers, after all, went through a pretty lengthy period of being unreliable, gossip-mongering pieces of yellow journalism, and even today there are plenty of 20th-century media islands that appear to be run by their owners with something less than journalistic integrity at their heart. So why in the world can’t Blogs do the same job, just without the costly and messy paper delivery model?
It’s just fear. The American auto industry has made some bad decisions, and bad cars, for a while now, and their business model is looking grim. Meh. What about a world without American-made cars? I’m no economist so I’ll take everyone’s word that this would have dire consequences for our economy and long-term survival as a nation, but I wonder if it has to be these companies. Why not a different company? A new company? I mean, there’s sober economic analysis that tells you we must preserve what’s left of our large manufacturing base. And then there’s simple fear where people imagine a world where Ford doesn’t exist and get all squirrelly about it, for no better reason than because it’s been there for their entire lifetime.
A sunny attitude for someone who writes about dystopias, I suppose. I guess I don’t have much faith that civilization will survive indefinitely, and I see Thunderdome in our future – I just don’t see it coming because the newspapers go away, is all.
Ah, but Jeff: have you noticed that the only people bitching about the death of the newspaper either work for or used to work for newspapers? Of course they’re going to whine about the decline of the only job for which they’re qualified other than as “bulk semen receptacle”. It’s like the bullshit about the death of the daily newspaper book review section: the only folks who care are those idiots who look forward to seeing a review of their books in those sections. They obviously enjoy being nagged to death by seventysomething alter kokkers who figure that their buying a book gives them the right to bitch to the author about the cancellation of Matlock, but the rest of the writer community has higher standards.
That’s why I don’t worry about it. Papers can either improve their products to where people are willing to pay for them again, improve the product and the financing so that it can be given away for free and still profit, or shut down. Since most papers are run and populated with bottom-of-the-barrel journalism majors who can’t otherwise get paid to masturbate like a caged ape all day, it’ll be the last, because even if the writers want to change, the editors will whine “Oh, we tried something like that back in 1985, and since it didn’t work then, it won’t work now.” Good riddance to bad rubbish, I says.
Good point about the very people who are the apparatus of newspapers etc being the ones most upset by their demise. I view a lot of this as organic evolution of society. There are plenty of industries that have faded away, most so long ago we aren’t upset by it. I don’t like to see anyone lose their jobs or livelihood, but the world spins on.